Why should your Marketing Strategy be aligned with your Business Goals?

Are you a biz owner,

• That’s not sure where the marketing efforts are headed

• Are exhausted with all the different marketing activities that need to be done

• Are frustrated with not seeing any results, in spite of all these efforts

Then you’re in the right place my friend, if your marketing activities are not giving you the results you expect, it’s because your marketing strategy is not aligned with your business goals. You might as well light that money on fire!

Let’s be real, if you are spending money on marketing, you don’t just want a beautiful marketing campaign, what you want are results!

While I know all you’ll are kick ass biz owners, but let’s for a moment take a look at some of the common business goals that you may have:

• Running a profitable operation

• Entering into a new market

• Increasing the number of customers

• Launching a new product

• Increasing Employee Engagement

• Controlling debts

• Increasing productivity

This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but covers pretty much all the basic goals.

Now let’s take a look at what a Marketing Strategy is:

Marketing Strategy combines business goals, marketing goals and

marketing objectives into a single comprehensive plan. This plan is the long term road map towards achieving the business goals.

Essentially, there are two different types of Business Models, that influence your company’s marketing strategy:

• B2C (Business to Consumer): this means when a business sells its products or services to the end consumer directly

• B2B (Busi

ness to Business): when a business sells its products or services to another business or customer (not the end user or consumer)

A strategy is a plan, and so you can have various types of marketing strategies, some of the most common ones are:

The 4 P’s or 7 P’s strategy

Product or Service Strategy

• Traditional or Digital Strategy

• Communication Strategy

Now that we have established what business goals are and what a Marketing strategy is, let’s dive into why it's important to align them.

Very simply put, Marketing requires a lot of resources and efforts and if they are aligned with your business goals, your investment will not go waste. Also as a business, your marketing function cannot be operating in a vacuum, it has to be in line with your overall business strategy.

I know it seems like a very obvious thing to do, but you would be surprised at how many businesses do not actually have an aligned strategy, and so their investment in Marketing, does not give the required results.

Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say one of your business goals for the year is to enter into a new market, then your Marketing Strategy has to be Market Development (using Ansoff's Matrix as a point of reference).

Your Marketing strategy cannot talk about increasing market share in existing markets, unless you're a big ass corporate organization. Your marketing strategy, in alignment with your business goals has to be Entering New Markets, the Marketing Execution Plan has to include, New Product Launches, Route to Market Strategies, Introductory Pricing, Promotional Offers, key messages adapted to the new market.

NOTE: A new market doe

s not have to be a new geographic market, it could simply be another area in the same city that you are in.

In the next section, we’ll be touching upon the different ways in which you can align your marketing strategy with your business goal:

The simplest way is to make sure that the objectives are aligned, for example if the business goals is expansion then Marketing strategy has to be growth, you can have an expansionary business goal and a restrictive marketing strategy (or budget) to support it. This is a real life situation that I have seen with multiple biz owners.

1. Making sure that Marketing is involved in the planning process right from the beginning

This is obvious, if marketing is not in the loop obviously they cannot provide their inputs. Further, as marketing is generally also involved in the communications part of the process, it helps piece all the messaging together.

1. When choosing your marketing mix strategy, keep asking questions to ensure that it is aligned to the business goals

If your marketing activities are not tying in with your overall business goals, should you even be doing them? There will be times when certain activities will have to be undertaken, as a ground work or preparation for other projects. But those need to be evaluated carefully. Keeping the previous example as reference, redesigning your offer or packaging for a new market, is it legally required or socially necessary? Or is it something you are doing because you’re entering a new area.

1. Picking relevant Marketing Metrics and continuously tracking them

At the end of the day, from a biz owner perspective, your marketing activities in the short term have to have an incremental impact on your revenue. So it’s important to make sure that the marketing metrics are relevant, simple, easy to track and show results. Another important point to remember as well, is that most of the time,

marketing results are not immediate, so metrics for tracking with a time lag also should be put in place.

For example, incremental revenue from a Marketing Activity, may take 1 month or 3 months to track, however, keeping a metric like incremental sales enquiries, website traffic, website hits, etc could be some KPIs that could be tracked in the interim to measure marketing effectiveness.

1. Clearly stating the time lag vs marketing impact factor

Like mentioned in the previous point, marketing activities generally have a lag time of 1 to 3 months, unless it's a very short term project based campaign. So clearly stating this time lag is important so as to set and manage expectations. It is important to understand that the impact on the sales will be seen only in the following quarter.

1. Determining if you have the relevant resources to deliver on your Marketing Strategy

This may seem like a strange point to be on this blog post, however so many times, marketing strategies are not aligned with business goals, simply there are no qualified resources to analyze and map them out together. So if you’re a biz owner with limited or no marketing resources, this could be a point of concern for you. If this is the case, just reach to any marketing consultant on a project basis and they can help you with this exercise.

For you all you skimmers, who have come straight to the bottom of the page, I got you because I am exactly like you, let’s do a quick blog post recap:

• if your marketing activities are not giving you the results you expect, it’s because your marketing strategy is not aligned with your business goals.

• Marketing Strategy combines business goals, marketing goals and marketing objectives into a single comprehensive plan. This plan is the long term road map towards achieving the business goals.

• Marketing requires a lot of resources and efforts and if they are aligned with your business goals, your investment will not go waste. Also as a business, your marketing function cannot be operating in a vacuum, it has to be in line with

your overall business strategy.

• Some of the easiest ways to align your marketing strategy with your business goals are: Making sure that Marketing is involved in the planning process right from the beginning, When choosing your marketing mix strategy, keep asking questions to ensure that it is aligned to the business goals, Picking relevant Marketing Metrics and continuously tracking them, Clearly stating the time lag vs marketing impact factor and determining if you have the relevant resources to deliver on your Marketing Strategy.

• If as a biz owner, you’re struggling with aligning your marketing strategy to your biz goals, please do reach out to a Marketing consultant or coach, who can do this for you at a very reasonable price. But the positive impact of this alignment will be very beneficial for you and your business.

In the next blog post, we will be looking at the difference between Marketing & Branding, how to create an effective marketin

g strategy that will boost your brand equity.

I hope that you found this marketing post useful and if you have any questions, or would like to share your thoughts on this topic, feel free to connect with me via Instagram @rutaparanjape